SMS Marketing

Whether you call them mobile phones, cellular phones or cell phones, the fact remains: You ALWAYS read your text messages. SMS (short message service) messages sent to your customer’s cell phones will get read 95% of the time, and I can bet you like those open rates!

Ten years ago, email marketing worked much better than it did now. The reason that emails don’t get opened up as much as they used to can get summed up in four simple letters: SPAM. Even with laws, fines and enforced jail terms for the worst illegal spammers in the U.S. And other countries, spam emails still account for over 90% of all emails. Not all this email is landing in your inbox, of course, with gmail, yahoo and other major email providers doing a quite decent job of filtering out spam email, these days.

But what does this mean for you? With the strict spam filters these major email providers use, it makes it harder for your completely legitimate emails sent with the permission of your customer to actually land in their inbox. Besides that, people have been so desensitized by years of spam and legitimate promotional email lists, even those that they have signed up for, that they often just delete the legal promotional emails instead of reading them.

The end result is, many businesses are only seeing their newsletter emails, broadcast emails, sale emails, etc. getting opened by 5-20% of the people on their lists. Those that have an open rate anything above 20% are doing quite good!

Compare that to SMS messages, even promotional ones, and there’s no comparison. You want more eyeballs on your messages, right?

Let’s take a look at the math. Say you have 10,000 people on your email list. You send them an email once a week. Let’s be optimistic and say 20% of them open your emails once per week. That means 2000 of your messages get read every week.

Now let’s say you have a list of cell phone numbers from customers who have agreed to receive promotional SMS messages from you. The list size is just 2500 numbers, only 25% of the size of your email list of customers. If we are a bit pessimistic and say only 90% of them open your promotional text message, that means 2250 of them open your message. You would get a higher amount of people reading your messages with just a fourth the size of the list!

Surely you can see the value in building SMS lists, now. And it would be better to do it sooner, rather than later. Just like email marketing was more effective as a marketing technique 10 years ago, in 10 years SMS marketing may be less effective than it is at this moment. So it’s important to take advantage of it before most businesses do and while it’s at it’s height of effectiveness!

Even though SMS marketing can be incredibly effective, it does not have to be expensive. Far from it. You can find bulk SMS messaging providers which give you the option to manage everything yourself, online, for prices in the double digits per month, and can easily send out messages as often as you like with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Alternatively, you can find a marketing consultant who will charge you a fee for services and collect all the cell phone numbers and send messages on your behalf, according to the strategy which you have planned, together. CLICK HERE to learn more